


Eye see what you did there

by Vabulous



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Disability?, Fix-It, Look I have no idea what I’m doing, Other, SO, There isn’t actually much of the pairing in this, What am I doing, at least until the very end, how do you tag, i guess, please read it anyway?, the cannon wasn’t addressing the issue to my satisfaction so I wrote a fic about it, this is my first ever post
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:01:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26901817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vabulous/pseuds/Vabulous
Summary: Juno doesn’t expect losing an eye to matter that much. He’s wrong.(Otherwise known as the ramblings of a person without depth perception on what problems Juno should be facing, if people actually knew anything about living without depth perception.)
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 12
Kudos: 47





	Eye see what you did there

**Author's Note:**

> Look. First of all thanks for showing up! I know this is a bit of a disaster. I’m trying! Secondly, I’d like to say that I love Penumbra. I only recently discovered it, and it does so much so well, especially in regard to representation. I really really appreciate that.  
> But I also, unfortunately, am a person who goes through life without depth perception, and so it was really distracting every time it got brought up on the show. I appreciate they can’t research everything, but I am so sick of it either being misunderstood or glossed over, because the topic is near and dear to me. So here you go, a rambling story about how Juno should have been affected after losing his eye, with some considerations to future space mars.  
> CW: brief mention of not expecting to live a long life, non-explicit description of a panic attack, the general stack of mental illness in a trench coat that is Juno Steel, life changing/becoming harder after disability, detailed description of things a person can no longer do and the general negative headspace surrounding that issue.  
> Please don’t read if this is likely to harm you. This fic is definitely not worth it.
> 
> Enjoy?

You don’t ever realise what you have until it’s gone.  
The first time Juno wakes up without an eye… ok, that’s not quite when he notices the difference. He’s spent a while without it by now, as copious amounts of blood doesn’t exactly help one see clearly. His shots were sloppy towards the end of the fight with Measma, but that could be chalked up to all kinds of other factors, such as blood loss and exhaustion and just having an utterly shitty experience for longer than he ever dares contemplating. So it’s fine. He’s fine.  
Sure, the dark side of his vision disturbs him, but it’s not something that really matters right? He’ll just have to move his neck a bit more.  
After he leaves, once he gets home, things really start to set in. The key goes into the lock on muscle memory, and he all but collapses through the threshold. He needs something to wake himself up. Or something to drink.  
The second option sounds better.  
He knows the way to the cupboard too easily. There’s a glass in his hand and a bottle in the other before he even registers he’s opened the door. A familiar dance: glass on counter, top off bottle, pour the—  
Wait.  
Golden liquid spills over the counter, running in rivulets over the edge and down the cabinets.  
What?  
The stream of liquid was nowhere near the glass. What a waste. He wasn’t usually this clumsy whilst sober.  
What?  
He’d never really thought about what depth perception actually meant before. What else would change? He had an active job, his life depended upon his sharp reflexes, quick judgement and quicker action. Fast, forceful, and importantly, accurate.  
He didn’t sleep much that night.  
From a quick search on his comms, he discovers that A) people are horribly pedantic about what “depth perception” actually is, and B) it will hopefully only affect him close up, within 2 meters or so from him. Shooting, ironically, should be just as it was, provided the target was further than that, because as it turns out, you unconditionally have a dominant eye you use for those distances anyway.  
Obviously he’ll have to be more careful with the lack of peripheral vision on that side. He could easily miss a person or deadly weapon stood in the larger blind spot. More neck turning means less ability to stealthily look at things, but he was never that good at subtlety anyway. Something about an “abrasive personality”…  
It won’t affect his driving, which is nice. There are enough safety features auto-installed in his car that he can just fiddle with a few settings to get alerts for his blank side. He’ll be as safe as he ever was.  
Months drag by, bringing a scattering of nasty surprises with them.  
Turns out he used to use his other eye as the dominant one when shooting, so his shots stray wildly. With time, it will improve, but for now he’s stuck in a horrible loop of forgetting his new circumstances in the thrill, only to be rudely reminded.  
Almost worse is physical contact and up-close fighting.  
The problem first shows in knocked-over glasses and mugs and walking into things. He has bruises on his arms and legs and hips. Anywhere unfamiliar is a recipe for more mottled blue marks. If someone else moves something, he will knock into it. One day his hand collided with Rita’s shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, because he thought she was further away.  
He stops reaching for people after that.  
The same is true in reverse as well. He has no way of distinguishing the hurtful touches anymore, so ends up flinching from all of them. Throwing a punch is a lot harder now. The quicker the decision, the worse it gets.  
The night poses a problem now too. It’s even harder to work out the distance of an object with nothing to reference it with. It’s the same with anything flying or floating. He can’t catch anymore, although his throwing is as good as ever. 

Then comes the eye. The Thea Spectrum.  
It’s both better and worse. The Thea is irrevocably practical. It’s here to help him do his job, solve his cases. But it doesn’t work like an actual eye. It doesn’t cooperate with the other to form an overlapping picture like his flesh one used to. So the problems remain.  
His fear of heights has escalated dramatically since the loss of his depth perception (yes, he knows that it’s technically his binocular vision he lost, and depth perception is partly calculations done by his brain of how relatively far objects are from each other, but he doesn’t care he’s calling it depth perception, screw you.). It’s harder to run down unfamiliar stairs when he has to watch his feet and use the hand rail. It’s especially hard if he hasn’t come up them already. Drops and edges suddenly have the potential to be any distance. He can’t jump over walls without placing his hands on them first. It’s just so much… extra, all the time, and nobody knows and every time it sends sharp emotions through him; anger, frustration, dispare, and a hollow ache of loss. It’s overwhelming and hard to put into words.  
One thing he really doesn’t expect, which is a much bigger deal than either of them could have possibly anticipated, actually happens because of Rita. She insists he take a break, watch one of her silly vids with her. It’s a supernatural one, cringy and predictable with characters he wants to yell at. And then it happens.  
A jumpscare. A stupid, shitty jumpscare in a stupid, shitty vid.  
He flinches so hard it’s painful, and the acceleration of his heart probably broke some sort of speed record. It’s stupid this vid is stupid and he can’t stop his heavy gasps and it’s all so utterly infuriating—  
Because he can’t tell how far away that hand that just reached towards the screen was.  
He asks Rita if they can watch something else, after they paused the vid long enough to get him to calm his stupid head down. She agrees.  
She never suggests horror again.  
It’s not an instinct he wants to train out of himself. After all, his life depends on him getting the hell out of the way. Maybe some day that won’t be the case, if he ever makes it that far. So he strikes that off as yet another thing he can no longer do, and moves on. 

At least with the Thea, he can shoot better. He can ask it to judge distances for him before he jumps, and he’s as good a shot, no, better than he ever was. He doesn’t like how much it helps him. How much he now relies on it. He closes the lid where the Thea now rests when he concentrates, when he wants to feel more human.  
He still misses it desperately when it’s gone. All the time relying on it has weakened his practice without it. He gets worse fast, and the crawl back up is slow and painful. 

The night he finally makes up (and out) with Peter Nureyev is both wonderful and rudely interrupted by everything that has changed since they parted. First Juno walks into a table, which he writes off as nerves with a rueful chuckle when Peter raises a half-sardonic-half-questioning eyebrow. When embarrassing confessions of feelings are the easier option, now that’s a bad situation. Then he flinched from a casual touch. And then, after a highly awkward conversation and a lot of persuasion that “It’s fine, Peter! I want this I swear!” Juno elbows him in the face.  
Peter sits back.  
“Juno… I really think we need to talk about this.”  
He’s right, which is at least twice as infuriating when Juno’s hot and bothered and would much, much rather he get back to doing delicious things with his very willing personage.  
He glares defiantly.  
“Juno…”  
He gives in.  
“I’m sorry Peter. I want this. I want this so much and I just want to forget and now I’m making this all about me when I…”  
He chokes back a sob, more frustration than misery.  
“This is about what happened with Measma, isn’t it?”  
“Well, yes. But not in the way you probably think. It’s…” he struggles to find the words, before laying back with a sigh. Just be honest. Explain as best you can, and hope he cares enough to stay.  
“What happened to my eye… it isn’t just cosmetic.”  
“Your shooting.” He guesses confidently.  
“Actually, there was a 50/50 chance of that not being affected at all,” he chuckles darkly. “No it’s all the other things. A million tiny moments of clumsyness that remind me of what happened. Turns out depth perception,” (he squashes the inner scientist which is throwing a tantrum,) “is a lot more important than I gave it credit for.”  
“Oh. So the bruises and the flinching and the bumping into things…”  
“Look, I’m not saying I don’t have trauma. I could probably win the bingo with things left unlisted. But that… I really do want contact, and I want to do this, and the only reason there’s a problem is because I physically can’t tell very easily how far away close things are.”  
“That could apply metaphorically too…”  
“Stop philosophising and kiss me already!”  
And they did. 

It gets better with time. This sort of thing never goes away entirely, but he gets better and better at compensation until it’s practically invisible.  
Really, all we can ever do is learn to make the most out of the hands we’re dealt, and Juno’s always been good at that.

**Author's Note:**

> Woah, someone actually made it down here? Hello! Thank you so much! If you have any questions or general comments feel free to leave them below. I know I’m not the best at writing, and this was bashed out by my dyslexic ass in a rage at 9pm and not beta’d at all, so I’m sorry if I made any errors. If you point them out I’ll fix them! Also if you think I need to add content warnings or tags, let me know. The last thing I want is to hurt anyone.


End file.
